The Royal Palm Hotel opened in 1898, the railroad reached town in 1904, and Fort Myers grew into the seat of Lee County. Downtown filled in along First Street — the brick storefronts, the 1908 Arcade Theatre, the old bank buildings — the district now revived and known as the River District. The royal palms Edison started spread up McGregor and through the historic neighborhoods of Edison Park and Dean Park, and the City of Palms settled into its place on the Southwest Florida coast. By the 1920s the Tamiami Trail had bridged the river and opened the road south, and the winter crowds kept coming for the climate Edison had advertised to the world.
Fort Myers began as a fort. In 1850, during the Third Seminole War, the U.S. Army built a post on the south bank of the Caloosahatchee and named it for Colonel Abraham Myers. The land had been Calusa for thousands of years, and Seminole after that; the fort was part of the long, hard federal campaign to remove them. The garrison came and went — it served as a Union outpost and saw one of the southernmost land actions of the Civil War — and was finally abandoned. In 1866 the first civilian settlers moved into the empty buildings and started a town; they kept the old fort's name, and Fort Myers it stayed.
Why People Visit Fort Myers
Fort Myers rewards travelers who want history, gardens, and the river rather than only a beach — the inventors' winter estates, the royal-palm boulevard, and a revived downtown on the Caloosahatchee. People come for the Edison and Ford estates and the City-of-Palms streetscape, for the manatees and cypress boardwalks, and for an easygoing Southwest Florida day where Gilded-Age history and subtropical nature sit side by side.
